The Last Anniversary

Sophie moves onto the island and begins a new life as part of an unconventional family, where it seems everyone has a secret. Grace, a beautiful young mother, is feverishly planning a shocking escape from her perfect life. Margie, a frumpy housewife, has made a pact with a stranger. And dreamy Aunt Rose wonders if maybe it's about time she started making her own decisions.

Flight Patterns

Georgia Chambers has spent her life sifting through other people's pasts while trying to forget her own. But then her work as an expert on fine china - especially Limoges - requires her to return to the one place she swore she'd never revisit. It's been 13 years since Georgia left her family home on the coast of Florida, and nothing much has changed except that there are fewer oysters and more tourists.

Queen Sugar: A Novel

Why exactly Charley Bordelon's late father left her eight hundred sprawling acres of sugarcane land in rural Louisiana is as mysterious as it was generous. Recognizing this as a chance to start over, Charley and her 11-year-old daughter, Micah, say good-bye to Los Angeles. They arrive just in time for growing season but no amount of planning can prepare Charley for a Louisiana that's mired in the past: as her judgmental but big-hearted grandmother tells her, cane farming is always going to be a white man's business.

Perfect Peace: A Novel

When the seventh child of the Peace family, named Perfect, turns eight, her mother, Emma Jean, tells her bewildered daughter, "You was born a boy. I made you a girl. But that ain't what you was supposed to be. So from now on, you gon' be a boy. It'll be a little strange at first, but you'll get used to it, and this'll be over after while." From this point forward, his life becomes a bizarre kaleidoscope of events. Meanwhile, the Peace family is forced to question everything they thought they knew about gender, sexuality, unconditional love, and fulfillment.

The Sound of Glass

It has been two years since the death of Merritt Heyward's husband, Cal, when she receives unexpected news - Cal's family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by Cal's reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt. Charting the course of an uncertain life - and feeling guilt from her husband's tragic death - Merritt travels from her home in Maine to Beaufort, where the secrets of Cal's unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff.

When I'm Gone: A Novel

Luke Richardson has returned home after burying Natalie, his beloved wife of sixteen years, ready to face the hard job of raising their three children alone. But there's something he's not prepared for - a blue envelope with his name scrawled across the front in Natalie's handwriting, waiting for him on the floor of their suburban Michigan home.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells, taken without her knowledge, became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first immortal human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years.

The Stranger Within

Be careful what you wish for. On the surface, Callie Harwell has it all. Newly married to James, she finally gets the family she has longed for and becomes a mother to his two sons. So why is she arrested for murder? Things are not as Callie hoped they would be and she struggles to be accepted as part of James' family, and to keep hidden the secrets that could destroy her future. As her life spirals out of control, setting in motion a chain of events with devastating consequences, Callie is forced to question how well we ever really know ourselves.

Country

Stephanie Adams is a devoted stay-at-home mother, married to a successful lawyer in northern California, in a dead marriage she stayed in for years for the sake of her children. Then, on a ski trip in Squaw Valley, her fifty-two-year-old husband dies suddenly and all bets are off.

The Obsession

Naomi Bowes lost her innocence the night she followed her father into the woods. In freeing the girl trapped in the root cellar, Naomi revealed the horrible extent of her father's crimes and made him infamous. Now a successful photographer living under the name Naomi Carson, she has found a place that calls to her, thousands of miles away from everything she's ever known. Naomi wants to embrace the solitude, but the residents of Sunrise Cove keep forcing her to open up - especially the determined Xander Keaton.

Reconstructing Amelia

When Kate, single mother and law firm partner, gets an urgent phone call summoning her to her daughter's exclusive private school, she's shocked. Amelia has been suspended for cheating, something that would be completely out of character for her over-achieving, well-behaved daughter. Kate rushes to Grace Hall, but what she finds when she finally arrives is beyond comprehension. Her daughter is dead.

The Weekenders

Some people stay all summer long on the idyllic island of Belle Isle, North Carolina. Some people come only for the weekends - and it's something they look forward to all week long. When Riley Griggs is waiting for her husband to arrive at the ferry one Friday afternoon, she is instead served with papers informing her that her island home is being foreclosed. To make matters worse, her husband is nowhere to be found.

Publisher's Summary

A bright June day. A split-second distraction. A family forever changed.

Life is good for Maura Corrigan. Married to her college sweetheart, Pete, raising three young kids with her parents nearby in her peaceful Chicago suburb, her world is secure. Then one day, in a single turn of fate, that entire world comes crashing down and everything that she thought she knew changes.

Maura must learn to move forward with the weight of grief and the crushing guilt of an unforgivable secret. Pete senses a gap growing between him and his wife but finds it easier to escape to the bar with his friends than face the flaws in his marriage.

Meanwhile, Maura's parents are dealing with the fault lines in their own marriage. Charismatic Roger, who at 65, is still chasing the next business deal and Margaret, a pragmatic and proud homemaker, have been married for four decades, seemingly happily. But the truth is more complicated. Like Maura, Roger has secrets of his own and when his deceptions and weaknesses are exposed, Margaret's love and loyalty face the ultimate test.

Those We Love Most chronicles how these unforgettable characters confront their choices, examine their mistakes, fight for their most valuable relationships, and ultimately find their way back to each other. It takes us deep into the heart of what makes families and marriages tick and explores a fundamental question: when the ties that bind us to those we love are strained or broken, how do we pick up the pieces?

Deeply penetrating and brimming with emotional insight, this engrossing family drama heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

What the Critics Say

"Lee Woodruff knows how to get to the heart of the matter on every occasion." (Alice Hoffman)

"Lee Woodruff has written a beautiful, humorous, poignant page-turner about the complexities of love and marriage, tricky family dynamics, and the power of the human heart. Everything you want in a great read is here, including wonderful storytelling that builds to a satisfying ending. Loved it." (Adriana Trigiani)

"Those We Love Most is an engrossing story about family fragility, rupture, and redemption. Woodruff's beautiful and unflinching portrayal of the grief, betrayal, guilt, tenacity, and love that engulf this family in the aftermath of a devastating tragedy will keep you turning pages till the end." (Sue Monk Kidd)

1) the reader's slow pace - her voice is pleasantly, soothingly neutral, but lingers too much over the details.

2) The book is overdescribed: example: we only need a general, few sentence description of a holiday dinner, just enough to set the scene and create the ambience, not a half-hour dinner-thon! This might be just one of my quirks as a reader - I really don't like long descriptions of parties and gatherings unless there is key conversation involved that can advance the plot. I'm not interested in gossip, out-downs, what people are wearing and how their looks compare.

3) Dream sequence: unnecessary and too "aerie-faerie" for my tastes.

Totally good and on-target: a "perfect" life is never that. The protagonists go through a series of highly jarring events (giving specifics would be spoiling), and create learnings out of their experiences.

On a personal level, I have had a trifecta or even quadri-fecta of miseries during the past year, and can intimately relate to this novel. I'm glad to say I am still here, still reading and reviewing, and have learned much.

It seemed to me that one plot line was not quite resolved, and one transgression into the dark side was left to the past and never dealt with on an honest level.

This is a difficult book to review without giving spoilers, and so my talking points are correspondingly general.

What made the experience of listening to Those We Love Most the most enjoyable?

The authenticity of the emotions and the universal relevance found in this book made me want to keep listening. The insurmountable became surmountable. The growth of and repair of the many damaged emotions and relationships was a triumph that was reassuring. The notion that all is not lost even if we make serious mistakes in judgement as the characters in this book did was comforting.

What about Karen White’s performance did you like?

Karen did a masterful job with the many voices in this story and gave them personalities! That's what I love about audio books.

So all I have to say is got within 1-1/2 hours of finishing this book and stopped. I really didn't care how it ended because I feel like I spent the whole book waiting for it to start. It has some interesting aspects about marriage, infidelity, loss of a child etc however I didn't feel like I was getting any new insights from these characters experiences. I listen to a lot of books where these sorts of life-topics come up and I listen to them because I feel they can give me insight into other points of view of life problems. As I said above this one did not offer me anything new and so for me not worth the credit.

I'm sure there are those out there who will love this book, just not me. It simply wasn't the type of book I enjoy. The subject had great potential, but the book just doesn't get deep enough into the soul of the characters. I just didn't bond with the characters in this book and didn't feel like I really got to know them well enough and therefore I found myself really not caring about them.